The Gallery

The McClure Gallery of the VAC is an exhibition venue for professional artists, community based artists, and young emerging artists.  The gallery serves a strong educational function in the community, encouraging public appreciation of contemporary art through seminars, lectures and tours.  Accompanying exhibition catalogues are published when funding is available.

While the gallery mostly serves the Montreal and Quebec visual arts community, it welcomes submissions from further afield. We also welcome proposals from guest curators, through our Curatorial Programme.

Opening Hours:

McClure Gallery Season 2023 – 2024 

Exhibitions & Public Programming Fall 2023

Théo Bignon, Last Dance, 2022, glass beads, sequins, metal wire, cotton thread, butternut, watercolor, found beer glass, Teddy’s shooter glass, business card from l’Impact, matchbook from Eagle NYC. 11” x 6” x 22”.

Théo Bignon – Buddies

Exhibition: September 8 to October 14
Vernissage and artist-guided tour: September 14 at 6 pm
Art Hive with the artist: September 30, 10:30 am to 1 pm
Zine launch with Alex Tigchelaar: October 14, 5 to 7 pm

Buddies is an exhibition that celebrates and interrogates the gay bar as a space where queer bodies exist and resist. Théo Bignon presents a series of hand-embroidered works and objects where these sites are re-presented, tucked in speculative maps and other abstract compositions. Central to his work, the act of stitching is used as a tool for recollection as well as subversive decorative interventions.

Visual Arts Centre and McClure Gallery, corner of Victoria and Somerville avenues, in Westmount. Photo: Matt Ayotte

Renewal – Visual Art Centre’s biannual fundraising exhibition

Exhibition: October 20 to November 4
In-person and online auction / Auction launch: October 20 to November 4

The VAC’s exhibition theme Renew: start again, regenerate, revitalize and recreate! celebrates the organization’s ongoing commitment to building a more inclusive, open and accessible art centre. Rooted in a belief that equal access is the key to a more dynamic society, the VAC strives to connect a wide range of communities through a common quest to create, inspire and share. In this spirit, the VAC is proud to host a multi-faceted fundraising event to celebrate over 25 years of ARTreach, its community outreach programme, and over 75 years as an art school.

Snack Witch Joni Cheung , Soba’s Corner: A Chinese-Canadian Cooking Show—The Montréal Peanut Butter Dumpling Adventure, 2020, Video.

Joni Cheung (aka Snack Witch) – Pick up in 10

Exhibition: October 20 to November 4, 2023
Vernissage and artist-guided gallery tour: October 19 at 6 pm
“DTD? Down to Dumpling?” – Art Hive with Joni Cheung: November 4, from 10:30 am to 1 pm

Pick up in 10 is a shuffling through sensorial cues embedded within restaurants and domestic spaces. In this gathering of works, Snack Witch (Joni Cheung) uses the visual languages of the environments she grew up in to investigate the way objects retell and share the (hi)stories of her relations within physical and digital communities.

Sonia Bazar, Bodies, 2017, sculpture, copper, salt crystal, borax and panty hose. 7″ x10″.

Sonia Bazar – Back River

Artist talk at the McClure Gallery: November 9, 6 to 8 pm
‘Jane’s Walk’ with the artist at Back River Memorial Gardens Cemetery: October 15 at 2 pm

Back River exhibition at Museum of Jewish Montreal (MJM): November 24, 2023 to February 18, 2024.
Vernissage (MJM): November 23 at 7 pm

McClure Gallery, in collaboration with the Museum of Jewish Montreal (MJM), will present an artist talk with Sonia Bazar, who will discuss their solo multimedia exhibition at MJM. Sonia’s research focuses on erasure, time and death in the context of Back River Memorial Gardens Cemetery, Montreal’s oldest Jewish cemetery, dating from 1880 and still in use today. In addition to the artist talk at the McClure Gallery, the artist will guide visitors on a “Jane’s Walk” in the cemetery.